A Strange Commonplace Read online

  Another Story

  HE CALLED A MAN WHO HAD BEEN A FRIEND OF HIS youth, but to whom he had not spoken for forty-one years. They had simply lost touch, as the smartly descriptive phrase has it. He didn’t know it, but he called because he needed to make a story for himself, since the always changing story that he had held in his mind for all those forty-one years was his friend’s story, not his. So he called, getting the number from Los Angeles information. The old friend sounded the same as he’d always sounded, slightly drunk and bored, but he became irritable when he realized who was calling. Why the hell are you calling me after all this time? is, essentially, what he said. This angered the caller, and the story that he had prepared to release, is perhaps the word, became another story. He called, he lied, because of the considerable amount of money he owed the old friend, you remember that loan you gave me when I stayed with you and Jenny in San Francisco? The story was emerging into the eternal present of all stories, an insubstantial present, a chimera. The old friend remembered the loan, of course! It’s about time, he said, Jesus Christ, it’s been thirty-five years or more. He was taking the place assigned him in the rising fantasy edifice. And, the caller said, as well as the debt, I also came across that old copy of your Bomba the Jungle Boy that we used to have such laughs over, but, he said, he’d decided to keep that—for old times’ sake: nice touch, the boys’ book. It hardly needs to be said that the man owed his old friend nothing, nor did the old friend ever give or lend him a copy of any book that was not what he considered serious. Yet and yet, the old friend said that he wanted Bomber or whatever it was called back, and the money, too. He was doing very well in the role. The caller said that he’d just remembered the day he left the apartment on, what was it, Baker Street? Dolores?, and said good-bye to him and Jenny, and how the old friend had insisted that he come up with two hundred, or was it three hundred dollars? For the food he’d eaten, and the other things that he’d used, during his two-week stay with them. Apparently, the old friend had completely forgotten that the caller had bought all the booze and cigarettes, put gas in the car, picked up the check at the restaurants they’d gone to, apparently, he’d, sure, just forgotten all that on the day he’d packed up and left the apartment. The story was getting very clear now, and sharply delineated, and he hauled it rapidly up into the light. He reminded the old friend of the day that he and Jenny had gone shopping for a birthday present for him, a suede jacket was it? From Emporium Capwell? He remembered that day, didn’t he? Of course. That was the day that he and Jenny had gone to a motel in Belmont where they’d spent the better part of the afternoon. The old friend made some kind of a noise and then told him to go and fuck himself the son of a bitch that he was. To which the caller replied with a question having to do with the old friend’s alcoholism, was he still a drunk? Or had he found temperance, joy, and Jesus? There was a click on the other end of the line, the same sound that is present in many stories as well as films, a reassuring click that all is moving along as it should, a click that tells us where we are. He wondered if the old friend and Jenny were still together, she’s an old woman now, of course. She’d been really sweet, if a little naive, always just a step behind the then-current drivel and fashions and notions and truths. But he’d been touched that she’d gone to the trouble of faking an orgasm in the motel, as if she thought he’d care one way or another. So had he gone to a motel with her? He’d wanted to, standing there on Post Street, with the old friend’s suede jacket in its gleaming box.

  Movies

  HE GOT OFF THE SUBWAY AT A STOP HE HADN’T EVEN seen for more than forty years, walked up the stairs to the street and then down the block. The Alpine was still there, but now it was a multiplex, showing all the latest blow-’em-up, imbecile-comedy, fake-sex movies. The saloon that had been next door was now a mosque: the drunks and laughter, assignations and fistfights, gropings and jukebox hits now dead and displaced by benevolent and peaceful Islam and its benevolent and peaceful teachings. He would have gone in to see any movie at all, but that would have spoiled the effect of the cheap booze, of the fictitious and romanticized past that he’d decided to swallow, to breathe in, to anoint himself with. What he wanted to see was Tarzan and Laurel and Hardy; Robert Benchley and a Pete Smith Specialty; Red Dust and Beau Geste; something with Rondo Hatton or Bruce Cabot or Jack Lambert or Barton MacLane or Binnie Barnes or Gail Patrick or Claire Trevor or the sublime Jack Carson. He wanted to sprawl in a broken seat and eat Neccos and Jujubes, Black Crows and Nibs and Walnettos. This was not true. What he wanted was to be alive somewhere else, in some other time, to tell his mother things that she didn’t want to hear. To watch a playground softball game with his father, who would go home with him to a supper his mother had never made, a small-town, happy American supper, lavish with steaming gravy boats, bright vegetables, creamy mashed potatoes, a supper with homemade pies cooling on the windowsill for Pete the Tramp and Hans and Fritz to pinch. He wanted to eat Charms lollipops in all their strange, unearthly reds and greens and yellows and purples. He wanted his father to pick him up and carry him all the way home, and not to be the weak skirt-chaser that he had been and that had finally wrecked his idyllic marriage to his patient, loving, devoted wife. So his mother had always said, and so he had always believed, even though it was a perfect lie, smooth and lustrous from much-contented calibrations and adjustments. He believed it even now, standing in the breezy shade. Oh, not really, but he believed it even now. Men and women passed by, people who had not yet been born when he’d refined his pity for his mother and his loathing for his father—and vice versa—to a fine consistency, one of alienation and bitterness and inadequacy. Do they still make Nibs? They don’t make Walnettos. He wished that he could chafe his barely breathing nostalgia into a delicious, a self-satisfied sadness, but he was not only too old to dupe himself, he was too old to pretend that he could. Maybe he’d go in anyway and see a movie that starred some young actor who looked like a crazed frog irresistible to women.

  Pair of Deuces

  HE HELD A PAIR OF DEUCES, A KING OF DIAMONDS, A four of spades, and a seven of clubs. He drew three cards and waited to look to see if he’d got the third deuce. If he had drawn it, what? What would happen? What did he want to happen? Warren and Ray and Blackie were arranging their cards as best they could: Warren, shaking with palsy, Blackie, Jesus, Blackie had almost forgotten how to play the game, thought he was playing rummy half the time, and Ray, half-blind, who’d opened and drawn one card, looked irritated, so it was clear that the two low pair he’d probably been dealt had not miraculously become a full house. Even though he’d probably prayed to St. Anselm or St. Jude or the Blessed Virgin, or maybe the Infant Jesus of Prague. He’d Infant Jesus of Prague him right up his ass if he’d got his third deuce. And if he had, a big black Packard would appear on the lawn where they walked the pitiful Alzheimer’s patients around and around. He’d find his beautiful Borsalino on his shelf next to the idiotic baseball caps his daughter-in-law brought him; he’d make sure to lose them, but she brought more. They all had those logos or dim-witted messages on them. The one he liked best matter-of-factly stated: BORN TO LOVE TRAINED TO KILL. What an impossibly stupid woman she was. Well, he didn’t have to live with her. So, he’d have his Borsalino on, maybe that powder-blue tropical worsted suit he’d babied for years and years with the beautiful drape to the pants. He’d step into his Packard. That sweet young girl he’d got half-drunk with about three lifetimes ago in a bar off Gun Hill Road would be on the seat next to him in a little sun dress, a white sun dress. They’d finish what they started, oh the hell with it. What he really wanted to happen was for Warren and Blackie and Ray to disappear, for the Ridge Meadow Manor to disappear, and for himself to be as if he had never been: not to disappear, but to have never existed. Three deuces would do the trick. He looked at his cards, pushing the tight little booklet open with his thumb, card by card. The card that should have been his third deuce was a four of clubs. Ray, squinting as he laid his cards down, w
on, of course, with his lousy two pair. Well, all right. Tomorrow he’d try another magical route to oblivion.

  In Dreams

  HE SITS ON A COUCH IN WHAT SEEMS TO BE A BORROWED or leased apartment, and a woman who, he thinks, is his wife, although she looks like a girl he knew in high school, sits next to him; a boy of six or seven sits next to her, reading Bomba the Jungle Boy. They are, he understands, in Brooklyn. The door opens and a tall and handsome young black man enters. He is wearing a dark suit, starched white shirt, small-patterned navy blue tie, and a navy blue polo coat. He carries a glistening black briefcase. He has what he says is real-estate business to discuss with the woman, and although the two speak in normal, conversational voices, and neither mutter nor whisper, nothing that they say is intelligible. The young black man leaves, smiling faintly, lewdly, and he watches him through the street-floor window, next to which is a floor-model Philco radio. The young black man pauses on the steps leading to the sidewalk, then, pulling on a pair of gray suede gloves, descends quickly and is lost to sight. He and his wife and the child rise from the couch and stand on the sidewalk. They are going to dinner, a decision made wordlessly. They are going to Manhattan to have dinner, and find themselves amid a large crowd of people heading for the subway station. He reaches into his pocket to count his change, and notices that his wife has removed her suit jacket and walks next to him in a white brassiere. He says, “You’re a real sport to do that.” The child has disappeared, a good thing, or so he thinks, but he is relieved to see that she is carrying his book, which, he now sees, is Pierre. He would like to touch her breasts, but many women in the crowd angrily warn him not to. He has ninety-nine cents, surely more than enough for the subway. He nods at his wife, who is being ogled by passing black men, and they head toward a change booth, curiously situated on the street, and, even more curiously, one that has a green-and-black Art Deco facade, as do, he well knows, most bakeries. As they approach, the change booth, he sees, is a store with an open front, much like a greengrocery. Inside the store are three Jewish men, one of whom is sitting in the shadows in the rear of the room. He has a black blanket over his legs, which appear to end at his knees. “The Holocaust,” he says, and laughs. Another man stands to the side of the room, leaning arrogantly against the wall, and the third greets him with a nod, and pulls a black watch cap over his red kinky hair. The men are disheveled, dirty, and unkempt, and the store smells of fish. He holds out his hand, the change on his palm, and asks for two tokens. He tells the man, in what he knows is a badly disguised hysteria, that he and his wife want to dine in Manhattan. The man smiles, as does the other man, still leaning against the wall. “Wife?” the man says, and he sees that his wife has returned to the apartment, although he holds her jacket in his hand. The man takes the change and puts it in his watch cap. “Your name is Charles, is that correct?” He writes on a pad and shows it to him, but the name that he has written is “Claire.” “No, I want to eat.” “Eat?” the man says. “Fifty-six twenty-five Parkcrest West is your apartment?” The man nods, and thinks that he will never be able to find his way back to the apartment, to which he is now certain that his wife has not returned, but, instead, is having sex with two men in a hallway. The redheaded man reaches into his pocket and gives him two ten-dollar bills and three singles. “Here! Interest on the five hundred dollars your uncle told you about.” He cannot remember what uncle the man is referring to. “What?” he says. “I don’t want to get involved. Where is my wife?” But the men have left the store and where the wall against which the man slouched had been there now stands a high wooden fence, on the other side of which he can hear the three men laughing and commenting on his wife’s breasts in exaggerated Yiddish accents. He shouts, hoping that he can be heard on the other side of the fence, and the voices suddenly stop. He sees that the fence has, some four feet above the ground, a glassless window, behind which there is a kind of corral. The redheaded man is in the center of this corral, speaking to a woman dressed in a white shirt, fashionably faded and tattered jeans, and highly polished boots. The redheaded man has an expression of stupid and besotted lust on his face, a look of idiotic fascination. “I so admire Meryl Streep,” he says, “she is such a great thespianess.” The woman looks like Meryl Streep, but is a whore. He knows, now, that the redheaded man will not tell him anything about the subway that took his wife to the hallway, that he has completely forgotten him, that he is hypnotized by this whore. She smiles lasciviously at the redheaded man and suddenly, almost comically, falls on her back onto the muddy ground where she lies, supine, at his feet. Her arms are rigid at her sides and, naked below the waist save for her boots, she has spread her legs. The redheaded man is going to mount her. “Twenty-three dollars,” she says. His wife strolls into the corral and says, “What a cheap lay.” The young black man, who has been sitting on a folding chair, opens his briefcase. “I got the money,” he says, “I got the money, you fucking Jew bastard.”

  On the Roof

  HE WAS A SENIOR CREDIT INVESTIGATOR NOW FOR Textile Banking, a man to whom the younger men came for advice. He had his own cubicle and a pool secretary. Even though he himself was comparatively young, he was, he felt, entitled to wear an oxford gray suit and a homburg. She’d laughed at him when he first bought the hat, and her deadbeat summer friends from the beaches and bars of Coney Island and the Rockaways laughed, too, though they didn’t know him, didn’t even know his name. All they knew was that this boring office slave had managed to land Estelle. She was some piece of ass. They figured he’d been married before, because Estelle occasionally talked about some whining bitch and her brat who wanted more money, more money, always more money. And he’d just, finally, gotten a raise, for God’s sake. He emerged from the rooftop cupola and there they were, five tanned young jerks, sitting under an awning they’d rigged out of blankets and sheets they’d tied to and draped over clotheslines and poles. Estelle looked up and moved away, slightly, from some redheaded slob with his arm around her shoulders, but only slightly. She called out to him to come on over and have a cold beer in the shade. “You won’t even need a hat!” she yelled, the cunt. She laughed delightedly, and the slobs laughed even more delightedly. They were drinking his beer, they were eating his food, they were spending his money, they were, maybe, of course they were, fucking his wife. His wife. Jesus Christ Almighty, what a horse’s ass he’d turned out to be. He stood in the brutal sun, sweating in his oxford gray suit and gray homburg and black wing-tip shoes; in his black silk socks and black garters and white shirt; in his dark-blue tie and gold tie clasp. He smiled cheerfully and waved at the wonderful gang of carefree youths. He couldn’t wait to join the fun! Off came his homburg as he started toward them. It would be a cinch to throw her off the roof, but not today. Not today.

  A Familiar Woman

  IF HE SHOULD OCCASIONALLY GO INTO A SALOON ON THE way home from work, he’d often see her at the bar or at a table, in a purple velvet dress or a black gabardine suit. On the subway, she’d be standing, holding onto a pole, reading The Sacred Fount. She’d turn up on the street, in shorts, or in a suede jacket over a long flowered skirt. She’d be everywhere, although, as you may guess, she was but existent in his imagination. That’s the wrong word, one that is often used when the uncanny must be brought to heel. Perhaps madness, brief and flickering, is the word that covers these phenomena more accurately. Perhaps not. When he’d arrive home, there she really, as they say, really would be, in her actual, solid flesh. He would not look at her, but would change his clothes prior to making drinks for both of them. And although she had possessed, in the ruckus of their lives together, a purple velvet dress, a black gabardine suit, and a suede jacket, as well as more than one long flowered skirt, and many pairs of shorts, he would refuse to remember this fact, refuse to remember her owning or wearing these clothes. And the next day or week or month he’d find her again as he always found her, in a saloon, on the subway, turning into him as she rounded some corner, both of them far from home.
/>